by Tony Hoffart
As a designer, I generally lean towards more “simulationist” approaches to games. Not that I prescribe to much of the high-minded gaming philosophy schools that people might have heard of circling around the internet. Just that I like designing games where the mechanics can encompass virtually any gameable situation and it makes for a more fluid experience if the game resolves things roughly similar to what could occur in real-life. Often, if a game designer can accomplish a realistic template as a set of baseline numbers for a system they can later break the game physics with magic and superpowers in a way that’s consistent and balanced for the sort of feel the setting is going for.
Now that you know where I’m coming from I’ll explain what I’ve been up-to. About six months ago I found an article (on TVtropes of all places) about the Big Five Personality Traits. The big five is the only type of personality profile model that’s backed up by studies in psychology, and it’s dirt simple to understand. Five personality traits that are measured via a sliding percentile scale:
- Agreeableness
- Openness to Experience
- Extroversion
- Neuroticism
- Contentiousness
Obviously the higher the percentile in that personality trait the more prevalent it was in the personality.
My interest in this wasn’t purely academic. From previous work I was already leaning towards the thought that a person’s inclination to succeed had more bearing on his likelihood to do so then any raw “talent” he might have for the task. Even the data from the big five suggested that people that registered a high Openness to Experience generally had a higher I.Q. then those in the lower percentile. Also I wanted to focus more on what traits of the character could be measured simply for the sake of resolving die rolls rather than trying to ham-handedly justify why a player that constantly comes up with bone-headed ideas is plausibly role-playing a character with a high intelligence stat (or vice versa).
Interestingly many game systems are already using some or all of these traits in their own game stats (reinforcing my theory that gamers by-and-large are pretty smart after all 
. In the new White Wolf games, Wits was identical to Extroversion, Resolve paralleled with Contentiousness, and Neuroticism was close to being the inverse of Willpower.
Openness to Experience was an interesting case, it didn’t quite fit with the usual Intelligence stats because it measured things like interest in exploring. The thing is, all PC’s by DEFINITION want to explore. Hell, nearly every game out there has an Experience system as a REWARD for playing the game! I wasn’t about to start capping the amount of experience a PC could get based on a low stat so it became obvious that Openness could either be left out or some aspects could be dropped into an Intelligence stat.
Agreeableness was another sticky one. It measures things like Friendliness and how nice someone is. This obviously stepped on the toes of role-playing but generally every game had a Charisma-type stat so I had no problem leaving things at that.
The potential for gameability became apparent almost immediately. Contentiousness could be used as the stat to determine the result of extended tasks like weapon smithing because it represented attention to detail and determination to complete a task. Neuroticism; being the character’s mental/social equilibrium represented a kind of mental hit-points which could be like Cyberpunk’s “Cool” stat or Call of Cthulhu’s “Sanity”. As a player I was finding ways to integrate stats into role-playing the character that I hadn’t considered before and it helped me discover why certain movie and TV characters felt right or wrong carrying a certain skill/mindset combination.
Overall I found the idea of personality representing stats to be quite fruitful. In future posts I’ll explain how I used some of these ideas in a new game system and how you might be able to use them to resolve social-type actions in your games. Perhaps you’re seeing the potential already…
Edited by Jonathan Jacobs
Good topic!. In fact, I’m a psychologist and I am trying to design a RPG based on the TCI-R (Temperament and Character Inventory Revised).
I wonder if you’ve checked out the SMALLVILLE RPG from Margaret Weis Productions? I’m the developer and co-designer of the game, which eschews familiar stats in favor of six Values: Duty, Love, Truth, Glory, Justice, and Power. It pairs these up with Relationships (to the other PCs and to important NPCs). All action is derived from this core foundation.
What you’re suggesting here is very close to this and would work well as a hack of the Values in the RPG. Good stuff!
Hey Cam! It’s an honor to have you here – thanks for the kind words and stopping by!